The United coach saw his side slip to a 1-0 defeat at the Telstra Dome, courtesy of a Nick Ward header, ahead of a potential further meeting in the finals.

“We need to take a real good look at the three games against Melbourne to see where we can do better,” said Vidmar. “You have to say that Melbourne are a threat (for the championship), but you can’t tell what will happen over the next six weeks.

“It was an extremely flat performance tonight, not what we aspire to. Melbourne was extremely good, but we had no aggression and no desperation and only a few of our players could say they gave it everything they could.”

Vidmar refused to blame the poor performance on fatigue, following United’s extended season due to World Club Cup and Asian Champions League commitments.

“It’s not because of a backlog of game, we just weren’t at the races tonight – we were lucky it was just 1-0,” he said.

“(The amount of games) is something that’s foreign to us, we haven’t played more than 21 games in a season before, but we can’t live off the success of the Asian Champions League. Success is when you win trophies.

“We’ve got to get back to what we were doing at the start of the year, this is a nice slap in the face.

“We should be proud of what we’ve done this season, but we need to forget about that and roll up our sleeves. There’s no way this club should finish outside the top four.”